Here it is again, monday morning and me not wanting to get up and go to school. I saw this over at Slashdot and thought it was quite funny. Evidently some CalTech kids went up to MIT and pulled some nice little pranks over the weekend. The site has a list of the pranks that they pulled, and I must say, very nice. I also found another piece about how Sun Microsystems president Jonathan Schwartz is attacking the GPL.
Schwartz believes the licence goes too far. On top of the danger to respectable business practices, he argued the GPL is “IP colonialism”, a threat to poorer countries who need to use intellectual property to compete in the world marketplace.
On those countries the GPL imposes “a rather predatory obligation to [give back] all their IP to the wealthiest nation in the world”, the United States, which developed the GPL, Schwartz said, according to various report
Here is a little disclaimer before I make this comment, I know a bit about the GPL, Linux and all. I am by no means an expert. With that said, I think Schwartz missed a couple of things. While we can get code and information from other people in other countries, what’s to stop them from taking the code that we produce here in the US, and everywhere else for that matter, and use it in their products. I never really liked Sun all that much, and this furthers my dislike for them. They’re really are starting to sound a lot like Microsoft.